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My Profile
She blinded him with whiteness - 2008-07-25
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9:14 a.m. - 2008-01-09
Oh we've got trouble. I am certain that my ex is an infectious disease. At 6:00pm yesterday I said good-bye to my sweet kid. My little Wolf who had spent the afternoon drawing a comic book and until 6:00pm had a clear calm happy face. At 6:35 I said hello to a small human who sort of looked like my kid, but this guy was radiating waves of sullenness. His expression was hostile and his tone reeked. Everything about him had gone haywire. Gone was the sunshine. Gone was the pleasant cooperative kiddo. In his place was a miniature version of his father, right down to the sneer. 35 minutes with the ex and my boy's inner light was gone. Mike the joy sucker. Mike the cesspool with a beard. I know from my own bitter experience just how toxic the ex is. How just being around him makes you hurt inside and want to punch things. Somehow Mike can make the healthiest most assured person feel like shit about themselves. My ex is a goddamn Dementor. After two 12 point days I am almost positive today will bring a call from the school and a kid who spends the better part of the day having a tantrum and then sitting in the time-out room refusing to recant and telling his teachers to fuck off and die. I could see the deadness in my boy's eyes this morning. How he was deliberately trying to make me lose my cool with a combination of feigned obtuseness and a repellant 'tude. I tried. I tried to reach him. To hug him hard enough. To crack that veneer of satisfied hate and to cut through his sick glee over how nasty he was being and bring out that other kid who lives in there. The one with hope and a sense of humor and belief in himself as a worthwhile person. But the morning was short and the Mike disease was thick and richly rotten. And how does one say to her child, "Sweetie, it's a bad idea to go near your father. I know how awful he makes you feel. How it hurts and makes you want to hurt everyone around you. And how it makes you think that somehow if you can be nasty enough it'll make you feel better. But it doesn't work that way. Your father is poison, my son. His sickness spreads to everyone around him and poisons their thinking. Your dad hates himself and hates goodness of any kind. He's bent on destroying the light because he truly thinks it'll settle the score. There is NO SCORE to settle, my son. That is only your father's fucked up view of things. Why he excels at making everyone around him as miserable as he is himself is a mystery. But you have to fight it off. You must hang onto your good heart and see how wonderful you are. Please, please don't let him kill your spirit anymore. You are a great kid. Talented, loving and so very bright. That cloud of doubt and self-loathing is not real, it's only the noxious gas you breathed in from being around your father." How? How do you say that to a kid? A kid who still believes in Santa and the Tooth Fairy and that his daddy is a good guy? How do you not make your kid a monkey in the middle? Even if Mike were beating Wolf the courts would allow visitation, you think a judge would cut him off for being a Dementor? If I tried to explain I would look like the creep. I would come off like some crazed bitter vengeful ex-wife who was trying to pull a Bassinger-Baldwin act and make the kid a pawn in the hate wars. I don't even hate my ex. I loathe what he is. I detest what he does to the kids. But wasting the energy hating Mike is as senseless as hating monsoons. What good would it do to stand in the yard shaking my fists at the sky and raging? Far better to prepare for the monsoon and to have a plan for keeping things as dry and safe as possible. Yes? Since moving out of the area is impossible and Mike would never, ever opt out for Wolf's own good, somehow I have to figure out how to keep my child safe and dry from the toxic monsoon that is his father.
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